


sun-bruised. (five things that happened to karolina dean in the lead-up to her epic space adventure)

by warfare



Category: Marvel (Comics), Runaways (Comics)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2567282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warfare/pseuds/warfare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I want to stand as close to the edge without going over. Out on the edge you can see all the kinds of things you can't see at the center." -Kurt Vonnegut</p>
            </blockquote>





	sun-bruised. (five things that happened to karolina dean in the lead-up to her epic space adventure)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [derogatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/derogatory/gifts).



> This is for my best friend on her something something birthday.

"Since humans first began pushing the limits of travel," Gert tells her, not even looking up from her book, "they've been worried that there's a point at which they lose their minds." Karolina isn't sure what reaction Gert is seeking from her, and to be honest she's on the fence regarding whether or not this is meant to be a dig; Gert isn't malicious per se, not at heart, but she does like to push, to see how far she can take a person. In that way, Karolina supposes, she and Chase are very compatible. 

"With maritime travel, it was all about actual concrete fears - fears of the body, I guess?" Gert continues, seeming not to register Karolina's pointed nonresponse. "Like, am I going to fall off the side of the world, will God be angry at me and punish me for testing the limits of the creation he made, that kind of thing." A page turn; she's barely even reading. "That stuff holds with advances in technology - can people's bodies handle high speeds associated with locomotive travel, will cars hurt us in the long run, et cetera." She does look up briefly at that, meets Karolina's gaze with a half-grin. "I mean, global warming and all that - they were right to be scared, they just didn't understand the real dangers!" Karolina smiles back in spite of herself, even though she doesn't much feel like smiling. Gert can be a jerk without trying, but she's easy to love without trying, too.

"Where it gets metaphysical is when we leave the ground, actually." Another page turn - for dramatic effect? "Hot air balloons, early airplanes, transatlantic flight. Every time we push another boundary, people worry that'll be the point."

"What point?" Even when Gert is being jerk, Karolina loves her enough to let her keep going. Besides, she's interested in spite of herself; Gert is an excellent storyteller, animated and engaging, and she reminds Karolina of her better teachers.

Gert smiles wider, gratified. There are colors of Chase highlighting the quirk of her mouth. "The point of no return! Throughout the history of flight, people have been theorizing that there's a point at which if people lose contact with the ground for too long, they lose their minds." Molly is snoozing, head in Karolina's lap; Karolina smoothes her hair, gently shifting her legs from the couch to the floor. She doesn't comment on Gert's repetition. 

"Gert, that's so bogus. I mean, people have been uninformed and scared of the unknown for basically ever - that doesn't mean they were right."

"It's called 'space madness'," Gert continues, unstoppable. "People - real people, educated people, NASA people - are like, at a certain point, you see too much from too far away, you lose your ability to relate to people back on the ground. It's especially bad with astronauts outside of the craft. They float too long, they get vague and quiet, they start acting all absent. It's hard to get them to come back inside - they want to stay out there, with the quiet. With the, like, hugeness of space in its infinity. They only get normal back on the spacecraft - on solid ground." 

Karolina doesn't have much to say to that, so she sits quietly and stares at her nails, wondering what Nico would have to say.

"You don't have to worry about that, though." Gert says it as if it's an afterthought, but Karolina knows that Gert only has thoughts, rarely afterthoughts. 

"Oh, yeah?" Karolina knows that her mouth is quirking in a way she hates, unsure in a way she wishes she wasn't. "How come?"

"You've got us, dumbo." A dramatic sigh. "Me and Nico and Molly. Maybe not Chase. But us - we're NASA. We're always gonna be here to call you back in."

 

\---

 

Xavin isn't much for conversation in the first several days of their voyage; in spite of his - her - confident self-introduction, it's clear that she isn't used to company, and at any rate Karolina feels a bit as if they don't have much to say with one another. In the beginning she dreads the possibility of some sort of courtship, or worse, that her new fiancee might expect her to make good on their engagement, but Xavin seems to understand the weight of her impulsive decision, and she leaves Karolina to sort out her thoughts. 

She'd have thought that being stuck in a spacecraft with an amorous Skrull would be claustrophobic, but after months on the run with the Runaways, the idea of an empty room is new and foreign to her. The sound of her pacing rings uncomfortably in her ears, and while her first day of solitude is a relief, like the moment after a fight a long time coming, after a few days alone in the emptiness of space she feels the weight of the silence between them heavy on her shoulders like a winter coat. When she wakes up she finds herself seeking out the weight of a shoulder to press into, but she finds only cold, empty air meets her.

On the end of her first week alone with her thoughts Karolina has had enough and resolves to call home. Maybe not Nico - she knows her friend will still be mad at her, and she's not sure what she could possibly say to Molly, but she aches to talk to Gert, to be reproached for acceptance of patriarchal practices like arranged marriage, to hear her friend muttering about bondage and human chattel and whatever.

She climbs up into the ship's control room. She can't help noticing the way Xavin stiffens when she enters; she realizes suddenly that he's been sleeping in his seat, and she immediately feels guilty for not thinking twice about how there's only one bed in the ship.

She comes up on him slowly, carefully, like she used to approach stray cats in the neighborhood. As soon as she sees the controls on the dashboard she knows how foolish her plans to call home by herself were, and she smiles wryly.

"Does something amuse you?" Xavin's voice rings more softly than she was expecting off of the walls. Her voice sounds strange to Karolina - raspy, like it hasn't been used in a while. It takes her a second to even register that her companion has shifted from male to female.

"Yeah," Karolina barely chokes out her own response, and she coughs, surprised at how unused to her own voice she has become. Xavin is half up in an instant, hand almost at the small of her back, but she stops a millimeter from actual contact, hovering but never closing the distance. Karolina imagines she can feel the heat radiating gently off of her hands. "Sorry." Xavin shakes her head, sits back down. The awareness of the returned space between them surprises Karolina. "No, it's just I was thinking - I had to teach my parents how to set up their Facebook profiles, right? Like, I was never great at technology, right, but I could do what I needed to be social, you know? But this?" She gestures widely to the buttons laid out before her. "I have no idea. I couldn't call my friends if I wanted, you know? I'm basically functionally helpless."

"You are far from helpless," Xavin actually smiles at her, and Karolina isn't sure if she's simply starved for affection or whatever, but she feels her stomach drop a bit. She smiles back, and the silence they settle into is less uncomfortable than before.

"Hey, Xavin," she says after a moment, leaning back and resting the side of her head against the cool metal of the ship's walls, "have you ever heard of this thing called 'space madness'?"

Xavin stares into the black in front of them, her expression wry. "I've heard of many things which have been called that. It ranges in severity - what you would call 'space cabin fever', I suppose, but there are legitimate illnesses one can contract in space which cause mental deterioration - only in the weak, of course." She adds that thought as a sidebar, a hint of arrogance drifting across her voice, although Karolina assumes the comment is meant to reassure her. "And then there are stranger cases still."

"On earth, astronauts have always been worried about what's known as space madness." Karolina leans forward a bit, still unused to the way her hair flows upward now. "This idea that when humans stay up too long - when they're confronted with the smallness or bigness or... whatever of space, you know - that they go crazy, they can't relate to humans on the ground anymore, you know?" Xavin scoffs.

"I suppose it's to be expected that humans would be preoccupied with their own tiny planet in that way," she laughs, not entirely unkindly. "But you aren't human, betrothed, and anyway, it sounds like the precautionary tale of a family member who doesn't want to lose one of their own to the expanses of the universe, doesn't it?"

"I guess," Karolina responds, unsure, staring out into the darkness, wondering which direction Earth even is. "But, I mean - it's so quiet, so empty out there. Don't you feel like you could lose it, all alone out here like this?" Xavin looks up and back at her, meets her gaze fully for the first time since they left earth.

"But, Karolina," Xavin never sounds certain using her first name - almost as if she dreads a reprimand. "I am not alone out here."

Karolina is surprised by the comment, but more surprised by the warmth with which she says it, the lack of embarrassment in Xavin's expression. Staring out of the window, she feels as if she's able see the stars again - galaxies, planets, whirling out below her, neverending. She closes the distance between them in quiet steps, drapes herself gently over the top of Xavin's chair, considering.

"Yeah." She can hear the affection in her voice before she even begins to register the emotion. "I guess that's true."

After a while, Xavin asks, "Did you want to call your friends?"

Karolina shrugs, "Later, I guess."

 

\---

 

Karolina will always love Nico. Endlessly, across the universe. It's Murder World, unsurprisingly, that creates a gap between them that can't be crossed.

Karolina doesn't know what to do with her, because she knows that the worst thing would be to treat her as if nothing had happened to her. She feels a bit as if she's abandoned Julie, but at night Nico keeps waking up screaming. Karolina dodges hexes to get to her, to press her hand into Nico's, to whisper that it's fine now, that they are safe, that nothing is going to happen. At this point she knows it's a lie, but she whispers it anyway because the kindest thing she can do for Nico is to lie to her. She looks up out of the window and feels the absence of lights, spinning galaxies, the warmth of Xavin's hand in hers.

Because Nico can't sleep, she can't sleep, so when Julie goes to bed she takes to sitting on the floor of her room with her girlfriend's laptop. NASA has old audio recordings of space mission communications available on their YouTube channel, and she takes to listening to those.

"Hey, Jack, how you feeling?" The astronaut in question has been free-floating for a long while, and like Gert said, he's become less and less responsive to the voice connecting him back to Houston.

"Fine." His voice isn't empty, or cold, or any of that, but Karolina thinks she knows the feeling - he sounds tired, deadpan, like how your voice goes when the conversation switches to a topic you aren't interested in.

"You want to come inside?" Karolina knows what the NASA engineer is afraid of, hears Gert whispering, it's hard to get them to come back inside - they want to stay out there, with the quiet. "You been out there a while." His voice is warm, though, and not accusing, and she wonders if the two of them are friends on solid ground.

"Yeah." The reply is quiet, and it comes a beat too late, chasing a sigh. "Yeah, I guess I'd best, huh." Karolina can feel her own sigh mirror the astronaut's, picks up her phone to text Victor.

Always gonna be there to call you back in. She wonders if the astronaut remembered afterward the empty-fullness of space, how cold solid ground felt on his feet when he touched down. She wonders if he ever heard that voice in his head, later, years after the fact. Been out there a while. Guess I'd best, huh.

 

\---

 

"Are you joking?" Karolina is surprised enough to run into the Guardians of the Galaxy out here on the far ends of space, to say nothing of the fact that they know who she is on sight. She certainly isn't expecting for Gamora of all people to take her out of coffee, much less to open by explaining that Space Madness is, in fact, real, or has recently started to be, that the Avengers are starting to crack down on what they refer to as "Joyriders," teenagers who hail from earth but have been out for too long in space.

"Young superheroes just can't spend that much time out here recently," continues the universe's most dangerous woman in a tone that responds that she rarely jokes. "Quill isn't certain of all of the details, but Kitty Pryde has let him know that they think it's a side effect of too much time near tesserae, or something about the Infinity Gauntlet. Young people who've been out for extended periods have started reporting erratic behavior, headaches, irritability. It gets fixed if they're grounded for a bit, but it does appear to build up over time." Her expression is serious. "Cammi has been allowed to stay out as long as she checks in with us occasionally, but you have been out for twice as long as everyone else, and unsupervised. Tony Stark has been instructed to take you home for a checkup."

Karolina hopes her opinion of Iron Man doesn't show in her expression, but the look of pity on Gamora's face indicates that it must.

"Once you come back out, I can ask if Quill would be willing to sponsor you." Karolina shrugs, her head spinning. Later, she looks at the comm, but the only person she can think to call is Victor, and she feels embarrassed just imagining all of the apologies she owes him. No Gert, no Nico. She can't face Molly. No Xavin. Nobody. Just her and the emptiness of the crowded, noisy, vast expanses of space. 

 

\---

 

In what is quickly becoming the most bizarre series of coffee appointments of her life, Karolina finds herself sitting in an Avengers aircraft in low orbit across from Captain Marvel, who by the way looks _great_. She got this appointment through Victor, who apparently has become a Young Avenger or something? Which she really hopes isn't the result of like, Hank Pym pressuring him or whatever, but he seems so happy that she hesitates to question him, which is only one of the myriad ways in which she misses Gert.

"I mean, I know this is like, a super personal question," she begins, unsure from what angle to approach, "but, um, I was talking to a friend," Julie has been very cool about the whole being abandoned in order to chase across the galaxy in search of an ex-fiancee thing, which kind of freaks Karolina out. She wishes she'd get mad, just so she could try defending herself. 

"And, um, my friend heard you'd had, like, a thing where you couldn't use your powers without kind of like, killing yourself? But that you um, kept using them. And I just wondered, like." She gulps air, petrified to meet Carol Danvers' gaze, "like how you made the decision, and how you weighed, like, the pros and cons, you know. How do you know you're doing it for like, the right reasons, right, and not just like, for selfishness or like because you're like, arrogant or whatever - not! That I think you're arrogant or anything, just--"

"No," Carol cuts her off, impatient, "I understand what you're saying, I think." She sighs into her coffee, staring outside for a few minutes before continuing, "I think you can't let it be about you. That's what got to me, I think, originally. I was letting it be about me, but it just can't be. If you're going to put yourself on the line, it has to be about something more than proving yourself, or showing someone how wrong they were, or that kind of thing. Because with this kind of thing," she gestures outward, Karolina isn't sure toward what; herself, Karolina, the Avengers, the galaxies spinning eternally outside, "You don't anchor this in someone else, you can get lost. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Karolina nods, feeling lighter than she has in a while, looking back out past earth, further, toward what is left of Majesdane and what she hopes remains of Xavin. She feels warm, warmer even than she's used to, but she ignores the sensation, meets Captain Marvel's gaze. "Yeah, I think I do."


End file.
